My mother was all of seventeen when she got married. She had just finished her intermediate examination and her marriage put paid to her scholastic dreams. My father appreciated her command of Telugu and her knowledge of the Telugu classics, and she prided herself in the fact that she had been taught by that doyen of Telugu literature, Viswanatha Satyanarayana, the Jnanpith winner.
With my father’s initial postings in Tamil Nadu she picked up Tamil and could speak the language with respectable fluency. With his later posting to Calcutta she also learnt Bengali.
But English was another cup of tea. My father was keen that she should read, understand and speak the language with a certain measure of proficiency as it was considered a window to the world.
So her rigorous training in the area started right away. She was asked to listen to the 8 p.m. news on All India Radio in the wonderful voices of Surajit Sen, Latika Ratnam, Roshan Menon and Melville D’Mello, the fabled news readers of yesteryear who ruled the radio waves. After he left for office she had to read The Statesman , the leading daily of the city of Calcutta at that time, known for its standard of English, and report to him the major news items of the day.
In time my mother earned her stripes by reading many of our school texts and even the English novels we brought home from our well-stocked libraries. Mother would painstakingly underscore the unfamiliar words and sentences in a book that defied her understanding and ask us to explain. A willing learner, she was open to criticism and good humoured banter. She practised her English on her six children and tried to perfect her accent, although she never quite succeeded.
But father was not a stickler for accent as he said there was no one accent to English as it is a universal tongue and it would be fine as long as you are intelligible. In fact he quoted V.S. Naipaul who said “English belongs to all those who speak it”.
A landmark
A singular achievement came when she was able to talk and make herself understood by the visiting pastor of the church in our neighbourhood, who happened to be an Englishman.
It was just as well mother invested her time and resources in perfecting her English language skills because in time she would be conversing and corresponding with her sons-in-law belonging to other linguistic States. In fact, my mother’s entire personality seemed to have undergone a transformation — from a shy, retiring girl from a rural set-up, unsure of herself, to a confident, socially adept individual, at the same time retaining her innate simplicity.
When my father was no more and the older children had to move away she was able to hold her own, looking after the rest of the family. And father must be happy to know that all of us together, chiefly him, did a tremendous job of bringing up mother.
sudhadevi_nayak@yahoo.com
